Sunday, January 27, 2013

No amount of privacy settings can overcome bad behavior in public. I suspect these Auburn students never thought their antics would be captured in the permanent amber that is social media. Just a reminder, as long as their are digital tools -- like DVRs that stop framed this and handy point and shoot cameras -- you're just one post away from becoming accidentally famous.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Perhaps it is because this was always, from 1980 to now, an area that I firmly believed was never any business of the NCAA, but I dance tonight on the grave of rule 13-5-A and dozens of other picayune rules that existed not as much to "level" the playfield as increase the bureaucracy.

13-5-A, which will eliminate restrictions on sending printed recruiting
materials to recruits. Conferences still will be prohibited from sending
printed recruiting materials.

So fire up the printing presses, fellas. We can only hope the byzantine restrictions on page count, color and customization are next.

Why? Because it is the -- dare I say -- First Amendment right of a university to recruit for students with whatever tools they choose. And if Missouri wants to put a Vogue-like fashion spread of it's NIKE gear in the football guide, if Texas or Notre Dame want phone book scale guides, it is not any business of the University of North Carolina.

If a smaller institution wants to put it's eggs in the single basket of a high-turbo media guide, it's up to them to decide if that's good or bad.

And if the administration of one institution thinks it is foolish that others "waste" - be that green the folding kind or the save the earth kind - then here's a shocking revelation.

Don't do what the Jones do.

Similarly, the NCAA is recognizing that the communications world has past them by. That students REALLY do want to text communicate rather than use a dead technology to them like voice or email. Thus also gone this week:

13-3, which will eliminate restrictions on methods and modes of communication during recruiting.

Let's add in, getting the national out of the business of forcing a school to use reports.

13-4, which will eliminate the requirement that institutions provide
materials such as the banned-drug list and Academic Progress Rate data
to recruits.

Guess what? Recruits already know these things.

To do things that just make sense:

16-4, which will allow institutions, conferences or the NCAA to pay for medical and related expenses for a student-athlete.

To not make kids choose between state or national athletic appearances their talent has earned.

16-8, which will allow student-athletes to receive actual and necessary
expenses and “reasonable benefits” associated with a national team
practice and competition and also will allow institutions to pay for any
number of national team tryouts and championship events.

Let's hope this is the start of a revolution in the rulebook where national is going to spend more time on the big issues.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Recovering items from the social media past could be big money, and not just to dig up that scandal. What about the photos you posted and forgot about? Ah yes, as Harry S Truman famously said, the only thing new in the world is the history we don't know. And these companies look to capitalize on old social data.

Te’o told Sports Illustrated that he would phone her in her hospital
room and stay on the line with her as he slept through the night. Her
relatives told him that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge
from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his
voice. If the conversations took place, who was on the other end of the
line?

That's a little more than some swapping back and forth of social media contacts or emails. That, my friends, is the land of Arkansas head football coaches, both Houston Nutt and Bobby Petrino.

Because phone records are very easy to produce.

And to request. So even if you aren't a public employee who's cell phone records are available for FOIA -- and you can scream invasion of privacy all day -- to save your reputation, you will produce them.

We will see Thursday if Te'o meets the press. Weiss wonders at the close of his column if he can recover from this. To that I have one name: Michael Vick.

The line of today on the continuing postmortem of The Girlfriend belongs to the two who burst the bubble. Timothy Burke of Deadspin gets the key quote:

As surprising as people find the facts of the story that we published on
Deadspin, I find it far more shocking that we’re the first ones to
actually look into it.

That's OK. Few of the professionals believed Woodward and Bernstein in the beginning.

Verification of the details is something we hear we will lose with the decline of traditional journalism, or perhaps better put, 20th century journalism. Because we can't trust the new networked media, the participatory media or social media. Even though survey after survey reveals we trust our friends more than we trust media sources, there remains something jarring to the old school among us.

Insiders want to believe. In part, because they want to stay inside. Sports reporters are especially endangered, and often hand off to the news side any serious controversies -- player bad behavior, NCAA investigations, financial misdealing -- not because they aren't good journalists or can't pursue the investigation. They can't be tainted by the revelations, lest they be cast out as unclean and no longer worthy of trust from "the department."

Chris Carter's X-Files hit the nail on the head: The Truth is Out There.

Sometimes, we don't want to see it. Does it mean we have to cynically disbelieve everything we hear or see related to college sports? No. In fact, that's the point. We want something that is pure, and sure, and true. We want a winner, and a loser -- fair and just. Thus we have such tremendous outrage when the officials signal first down and clearly there were chain links between the tip of the football and the stick.

But will we tell you the truth? Frankly, because so much of the reputation of a brand or institution is at stake if they lie, I would say in most cases yes.

The same for the emerging media. Think about this -- can Deadspin afford to be wrong? They are building their reputation. Can PigBoy37? Absolutely, as he hides behind the pseudo-privacy of a screen name. (Although, since Notre Dame's "investigators" claim to have seen the pithy chatter between the conspirators, let it serve as a reminder you're not as anonymous as you think.)

"If we're going to push these young people into public forums," said
Oklahoma's Mr. Mossman, "we owe it to them to offer some level of
protection."

Call a meeting Tuesday. Talk about social media policies of your university. Remind students this is their reputation, more so than the institution.

And if you need someone from the outside to deliver the message, there are numerous folks with ties to the field who can help. In disclosure, I do that on the side. So do folks like Chris Syme. Both of us former SIDs. I'm told the NCAA has a listing of approved or recommended trainers as well.

You know things are getting weird when the opening graph of a straight news story in the Chicago Tribune has this many covers.

The sup­posed ar­chi­tect of the Manti Te’o dead girl­friend hoax re­port­edly ad­mit­ted to fab­ri­cat­ing it with­out the for­mer Notre Dame star’s col­lu­sion, and a source con­firmed to the Tri­bune that the fic­ti­tious girl­friend told Te’o she faked her demise to avoid drug deal­ers.

I've not seen that many "supposed", "reported," and "alleged" in a lead since those made up crazy exercises from back in journalism 101.

Of course, it isn't helping that we have "sources" providing the details on the fictitious and the fake.

When no one is talking open and on the record, the nature of information is someone fills the void - even if the people giving the information are a shadowy as Kekua herself.

Dave Boyer writes in the Friday Washington Times about Vice President Joe Biden's recollection of being near a 2006 school shooting incident in Pennsylvania.

The context is the current gun reform talks, and Biden was sharing how even he was Bi­den re­calls be­ing near site of ’06 school shoot­ings in Penn­syl­va­nia.

“I happened to be literally — probably, it turned out, to be a quarter of a mile [away] at an outing when I heard gunshots in the woods,” Mr. Biden recounted. “We didn’t know. ... We thought they were hunters.”

The speculation is Biden, then a U.S. Senator from his home state of Delaware, was playing golf in the neighborhood of Charles Roberts IV's shooting of 10 at the West Nickel Mines School in Amish country.

Connection here? The paragraph that follows in the Washington Times:

An online search didn’t produce any earlier instances of Mr. Biden telling the story about having been within earshot of the school massacre.

Fact checking Biden's colorful stories is a national media pastime. In the wake of Te'o, it is a background reminder that for news events, the Internet is reasonably detailed into the early 2000s. Subject dependent on previous digitization of records or recollections, consulting "The Book of Knowledge" aids in these circumstances.

Moral to the story? Not unlike asking for proof of life, speakers in the future must take great care in their details and illustrations.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Speaking with sports agents and others, the Advertiser covered how the damage is growing by the hour for the future NFL star. The lead quote is the takeaway:

"If what he is saying is true, that he was a victim of a hoax, he should've come out right away and spoken. If he was my client, I would have had him come out two weeks ago and been in front of the story."

Thus spoke Kenny Zuckerman of Priority Sports.

Later in the story, we get the advice of Frank Vuono, who's clients include the New York Giants and the NFL.

"The advice we give our clients is to tell the truth because as much as it hurts now, it only gets worse if you don't. People in this country are willing to forgive."

"When there is a crisis situation, it is always good to try and respond as quickly as you can, usually in the first 24 hours. He won't get his story across until he gets in front of people."

All sage advice. Almost always falling on deaf ears in the college sports community. Rare is the circumstance -- TCU football's involvement in a campus drug bust -- where that is the plan of action.

A tip of the hat to the Advertiser on the quotes, and a reminder to all: Press Reader is your indispensable news tool. The global subscription allows access to hundreds of papers, in PDF format, like the Columbus Dispatch (when Tatoo-gate exploded), Philadelphia and Chicago markets (during Penn State) and now the Advertiser. If you are serious in this business -- sports or university side -- the $30 fee is money well spent.

I'd like to get back to a little reality check for the 99% of student-athletes (and just the rest of us folks).

Just a few days ago, I reminded the student-athletes at West Alabama that their digital world lives forever, that unless they are incredibly hacker skilled, the traces of what they leave behind will always be there. That I knew from first hand knowledge of the screening that Fortune 500 companies inflict -- privacy rights be damned -- to get solid social media intel on their potential employees.

I want you all to marinate in a very important fact of this Te'o case that has gone completely overlooked.

Once they learned about and believed that Te'o had been the victim of a scam, Notre Dame hired, as described in the media, "private investigators" to trace down the hoax.

If we are to believe what we read, they assembled the ring, learned of the communications of the group and identified the perps.

The athletic department knew on Dec. 26. But teammate suspected earlier. Te'o knew as early as Dec. 6. The department and Te'o continued the ruse through the media past the BCS Championship game, in part, to complete the investigation and not alert the hoaxer.

Or, so they say.

That's not to be cruel, but when your bad news gets exposed by Deadspin first, you officially lost control. We will never know if Notre Dame made a conscious decision to hope this would not surface, or were they planning a mea culpa event with the investigation appearing to be complete. Anticipate more questions about who knew what when a la Penn State.

UPDATE LATER TODAY RE: ABOVE STRIKETHRU: Notre Dame's AD didn't help this situation today with his comments. Alternately, Jack Swarbrick said the school was waiting for the Te'o family to come forward first and that he had encouraged the now former team member to speak up as the victim. (Second similar story).

This is about to become it's own hot mess.

On Wednesday, when Deadspin.com broke the story, Swarbrick said Notre
Dame did not go public with its findings sooner because it expected the
Te'o family to come forward first.

But Friday, Jan. 18, this word from Swarbrick was the family was set to go Monday, but as noted above, Deadspin beat them to it. Hard to understand in his statement is did the Te'os plan to make a statement Jan. 14 and simply backed down, then got burned on Wednesday, Jan. 16, or that the family was set to go on Monday, Jan. 21, and got scooped. If it is the upcoming Monday -- are they all insane? You planned to bring out the details on Martin Luther King Jr. Day?

Swarbrick does make our point for us to the AP (underscore is my emphasis):

Sometimes the best laid plans don't quite
work, and this was an example of that. Because the family lost the
opportunity in some ways to control the story.

Let's step away from the institutional aspect, and think about the people involved. High profile student-athletes are at risk in ways we never imagined.

My first thoughts on the scam were dark. I know the legends of CoSIDA from the 1950s and 1960s when organized crime and bookie syndicates were seeking information from athletic departments on injuries and other edges to influence gambling. The threats that resulted from certain SIDs standing up to not providing data to the "tip sheets" or accepting advertising from them.

Today, I don't have a bright solution, but I have one hint. Those who are quick to try to limit the monitoring of student-athletes might take a second to weigh the protective role that plays against the privacy invasion or freedom of speech concerns.

What the Forbes folks miss is the very beneficial and necessary trend in NCAA philosophy to mainstream student-athletes, to give them more of the general student body experience. Sounds like a focus on the 1% of super visible Mantis and Johnny Footballs

Banning also destroys the chance for the other 99% of student-athletes to reach out and build relationships for their teams and sports -- and their career futures -- by networking with others online.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

A great afternoon and evening talking with the coaches, administrators and student-athletes at the University of West Alabama about social media on Monday. Taking two events and putting them together in this new presentation, I came to a new "meme" to share:

There were only seven people who could have taken the picture of Spurrier and posted it online -- and four of them were the caddies who I seriously doubt would have done so (they'd be immediately fired, although Deadspin contended that is where the photo came from). So that leaves the three golfers in Steve's foursome -- ostensibly one of his friends both took the photo and let it get into the wild.

It reinforces the fact that no matter what protections you might take -- locking down a Twitter feed to private or Facebook to be viewed by friends only -- once it is posted for the world to see, those digital assets are easily copied and shared.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Here's a golden oldie from 2008 discovered while cleaning up some files. It was placed inside our web writing style guide for ArkansasRazorbacks.com. Enjoy.

TO BE, OR NOT TO BE

It really
isn’t a question.In sports writing, the
use of the helping verb “to be” weakens the action and implies passivity in the
prose.Sports are active, and the first
enemy of creating that active voice that best expresses the tone of
sports is passive verb choice.During the editing of copy, any
instance of is, are, was or were should serve as warning signs.Changing from the perfect tenses –
particularly the future perfect – achieves the goal: active voice and cleaner
copy.

As
examples, simply the verbs:

Arkansas will compete this weekend becomes Arkansas
competes this weekend

Sometimes,
a verb change is in order

Jones was presented
the MVP trophy becomes Jones received
the MVP trophy

Another
example:

WRONG:The Arkansas
bowling team will be on the road this weekend . . .

BETTER, BUT
STILL WRONG:The Arkansas bowling team
will go on the road this weekend . . .

CORRECT:The Arkansas
bowling team goes on the road this weekend . . .

EFFICIENT COPY VS. EXPRESSIVE

There is a
balance between common adverbs and florid writing.Huh?Perfect example.Fancy writing,
foo-foo writing, overly erudite writing – these are easier to understand than
florid.At the same time, florid –
defined as very flowery in style or elaborately decorated – is correct.Would ornate be a better word?Perhaps.Adverbs and adjectives can be a writers best friend and worst enemy.Just like dropping in the helping verbs to
add a grand tone, too many modifiers also lead to bloated text.

A confident
batter shouldn’t walk slowly to the plate.They should saunter to the plate.“Saunter” achieves two goals – it adds expression and it eliminates two
words:“walk slowly”.

Extra
modifiers lead to redundancies.A
performance cannot be “very unique” – by definition unique is
one-of-a-kind.A home run should not be
an “enormous giant” hit.A senior
captain is not a “valuable treasure”.

SECOND REFERENCES

By the
third time the athlete or school name appears, the reader gets bored.Modifier second references to preface a school
or name can break up the monotony of the repeated use of the object noun.Like any writing tool, consider it a spice;
not the meat.It becomes obvious and
distracting if every time an athlete’s name appears it is preceded or followed
by a modifying clause.Some details
should be written into the prose in a straightforward subject-verb-object
manner.

PASSIVE VOICE

Keep action
in copy by avoiding at all costs the passive voice.One technique to remember the
difference:show the reader (active) rather
than telling (passive). The classic
English class definition for the passive voice:the recipient of the action is not at the lead of the sentence.In the active, the subject does what the verb
expressed.

Look for
these flags:

Helping
verbs and perfect tense – “to be” + the key verb

Arkansas will be the host vs. Arkansas will host

Certain
other words – had, that, which

Passive
verbs – thought, wandered versus think, ran.

Verbs that
are abstract nouns -- -ment, -ing, -ion transformations

“It is” +
“that” – It is said that Arkansas
. . . .

As an example that we have all written:

ACTIVE:Smith
scored the winning basket with less than a second on the clock.

PASSIVE:The
winning basket was scored by Smith with less than a second on the clock.

ACTIVE:Smith
checked the Wolverine winger into the boards.

PASSIVE:The
Wolverine winger was checked into the boards by Smith.

On the first read, the passive might sound a little more
dramatic, but the helping “to be” verb (was) takes just a little strength out
of the action verbs (scored, checked).

SIMPLE TENSE

Copy for
sports publicity should be straight-forward.The perfect and progressive tenses rarely have a place in the day-to-day
operations and press releases of an organization.In long-form features (and long-form prose
like season preview, season review, yearbooks, press guides), these tenses can
move the story along.In the following
example, both sentences are grammatically correct, but which one evokes a sense
of activity.

Arkansas has been preparing for the NCAA
Championship for three years.

Arkansas prepared for the NCAA Championship
for three years.

There is the added benefit of taking up two fewer works to
say the same thing.

THE ULTIMATE CURE

Read what
you have written out loud.Not to
yourself.Putting prose to voice reveals
the sticking points.Wherever a
hesitation creeps into the reading, something is wrong with the writing.For example:

Arkansas Razorback Robert Childers, a triple jumper
on the track and field team, has been honored by the Southeastern Conference,
it was announced on Tuesday. Childers was named the SEC Field Athlete of
the Week.

Two clauses
are wrapped inside the first sentence, and the honor itself is set aside in a
second sentence.One might argue that “triple
jumper” and “on the track and field team” are redundant.To streamline this passage and make it
active:

The Southeastern
Conference honored Arkansas
triple jumper Robert Childers as the SEC Field Athlete of the Week this
Tuesday.

THE TIME AND PLACE FOR THE PASSIVE

In the
previous example of overlapping clauses and rough construction, we get a lead
that is fine for the granting institution.When issued by the league or organization, that group is almost always
at the front of the story. The emphasis
should be on the recipient from the point of view of the school involved.This is where the passive voice comes into
play for athletics – we want to lead with our athlete.

In his overview, Sam Slaughter goes over familiar ground. I like this one pullout:

The best-in-class, like Red Bull, have built entire media companies within their brand.

Or, like most larger college athletic departments (ArkansasRazorbacks.com/RazorVision back in the day, hello).

This is not the Adam Savage School, either. Slaughter's quick:

In practice, this means brands need to make a commitment to honesty and
transparency in the content they create, even if it reflects badly on
the brand itself. Customers know BS when they see it, and a story or
video that contains an unapologetic plug will quickly be dismissed. On
the other hand, leveling with customers about a brand’s own shortcomings
is a great way to engender trust.

Michael Pollan spoke to the American Historical Association recently, specifically to admonish the "professional historians" for ceding the public marketplace of ideas to persons like himself from other fields. He urged more context and more broad use of storytelling technique. He also hit right down my favorite "We're History" program theme:

"We live in this fog of presentness. Every politician would have us forget what they said yesterday."

Or coach. Or athletic administrator.

Readers groan. What's the point of the academic exercise?

First and foremost, with all the detail available -- from online sources, social media, big data waiting for someone's FOIA -- it is absurd to continue operating as if no one will notice when the story changes.

Second and most instructive, one of Pollan's solutions:

"At a time where the information available to us is so rich and so
chaotic, those who can provide the satisfactions of passing it all
through that narrow aperture of a story are more prized than ever."

To the curators, the sorters, the presenters of larger narratives -- to they go the long term hearts and minds of our publics. In turn goes their trust.

Thus, go with care when following the Adam Savage School and remember, if you have been upfront with your own narratives, you will have the chance to be the trusted source over others outside your group, even though you represent the vested interest of the organization itself.

In social media training, I call this a self inflicted wound. Best case, you look like an ass.

In the story, Jacob claims he was just joking. I await the outcry of the freedom of expression supporters, the privacy rights advocates, the opportunistic politicos who pass useless legislation like the New Jersey restriction on student monitoring. (As a side note, it's already started. One of the first comment posts on the original news story called out his friends as snitches.)

The Astoria, Ore., police department is making extremely clear how they got the info. One of Jacob's friends called in and another forwarded the post to the PD's own Facebook. After all -- if you see something, say something -- says Homeland Security. In their PIO post you even have "Media looking for a larger picture of the Facebook post screen capture can find it here."

What if . . .

Jacob was a student at Enormous State University. ESU has a student conduct policy that would cover underage drinking, and perhaps has a program looking to reduce it's impact. What would the Dean of Students do next.

And let's add, Jacob is a member of the ESU student government, in a leadership position among his peers.

Perhaps Jacob was a scholarship member of the ESU debate team, or the first chair of the ESU orchestra.

Finally, Jacob was a student-athlete.

What is ESU to do? If ESU is in New Jersey, or one of the other states trying to limit "monitoring", they'd be in a pickle.

No amount of laws, regulations, restrictions are going to protect Jacob when Jacob is the source. Again, you are your own reporter, editor and publisher -- and that means no one else to blame for your misquote, misinterpretation or mistake. For an old-school look back at some of these, go here.

In some ways, I feel for Jacob. He's in for a time in the 21st century version of the stocks in the public square for the next 24-48 hours, and as one very apt anonymous commenter on the story said stuck for the rest of his life on background checks with employers explaining this. Gee, reckon his call-backs for interviews might be limited based on concerns about trust issues after a hit and run?

He claims it was a joke (enter the freedom of expression crowd). Unfortunately, you don't get to joke around much in social media when dealing with real events. Jacob also told KATU-TV that he hit ice and slid into the car.

Ah, so you did hit the car? And you did flee from the scene of an accident? And you then posted it on Facebook.

Guess what? The PD was NEVER going to arrest you for drunk driving, or even underage drinking. Can't prove a thing. (Now, if you have a bong in your dorm room on Facebook or pictures of doing shots from your MixMaster, well, different story . . .)

Because of the post, police matched up Jacob's car damage with the hit-and-run report that would have gone down as an unsolved insurance claim.

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Shea Bennett's admonition to the digital that You Are What You Tweet is a great resource to share with those who don't get it from you.

Bennett speaks to what the spies once called "signals intelligence" that people can mine from your social media. The military might not get clear air discussions of operations, or an operative might not get a copy of the plans -- but you can sure learn a lot about how something is going to act, perform and react from listening to lots and lots of what seems to be random data.

I like how Bennett describes when people think they are "being real" and alternating that with a more refined projection of who they want you to think they are. Conclusion: "It makes you look fragmented, and random. Unpredictable. Even dangerous."

Wonder why you didn't get that call back now?

One of the other lines that caught my eye:

It’s readable by everybody else on the network (bar those that you’ve blocked, although there are many ways around that)

I point at this to bring in a discussion currently rolling on the CoSIDA LinkdIn site about New Jersey's new restriction on universities requiring students to give up log-ins to participate in monitoring. These new laws -- four states so far -- are pretty bad political theater. Chris Christie is just upholding what Facebook and others EULAs already require -- you can't give your log-in credentials to a third party for access to your account.

These laws DO NOT absolve students of legal or administrative ramifications of their actions. A public post of underage drinking in a campus facility or use of illegal drugs is still going to lead to sanctions. Violating the company policy on social media is still going to get you fired, and the sooner you learn that in college (help me out here, we are suppose to be preparing young people for the real world, yes?) the better.